Former Navy SEAL turns to treatment after survivor’s guilt and PTSD from a failed Afghan mission led to substance abuse, legal trouble

One in a series of stories about homeless veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

It was 5 o’clock on a July morning, and Nathan’s mother stopped the car on Park Boulevard.

They looked at the collection of San Diego’s homeless veterans stretching up the block. It was a line of haggard faces, all waiting to get a warm meal and a cot for the weekend.

Nathan, a tall, broad-shouldered former Navy SEAL, was under a court order to join them. His precarious high-wire act fueled by alcohol and post-traumatic stress disorder had finally collapsed, ending in a dust-up outside a bar and a criminal charge.

A judge mandated treatment, starting with the “Stand Down” event for homeless vets.

Nathan remembers that morning, less than seven months ago. His mother cried.

He was becoming one of them. He was already one of them.

“I was on the way out. I’ve put a gun in my mouth. I’ve felt it in my mouth. I’ve not known if there was a round in the chamber because I’ve been so drunk. And I’ve pulled the trigger,” said the 29-year-old San Diego native.

“I was in a bad, bad spot.”

Nathan, who doesn’t want his last name printed because of his pending legal case, came home from Afghanistan with haunted thoughts.

His mind still carries the image of 11 buddies whose remains he had to gather after a disastrous June 2005 mission in Afghanistan’s Hindu Kush mountains. It was the single largest loss of life for Navy SEALs at that point since World War II: Operation Red Wings.

Three SEALs were killed in a firefight, and eight SEALs died when a rescue helicopter went down. Nathan was one of the remaining team members sent to collect the bodies and put them into bags.

When he left the SEALs after five years, he couldn’t shake it. He carried the guilt of surviving while they had not. So he numbed up.

“It was very hard to go in public when I first got out. I froze up in the airport. I remember the first time I came back from combat, this is after I lost all my buddies, I just froze. I didn’t even move,” he said. “I would sweat, sweat, sweat — booze. OK, I feel good now.”

On the surface, he was lucky. He got an easy, high-money job for a security contractor, teaching people weapons. But underneath he wasn’t the good-times guy.

What people didn’t see was the darkened room, the bottle of Jameson whiskey and the obsessive Internet searches on military topics. The cocaine.

“I was making four times as much, and I was working a lot less. So I had a lot more time to get in trouble,” he said. “For a guy like me — any operator who’s been to combat — if you have idle time and money in your pocket, nine times out of 10 you’re going to go booze. Because you don’t want to be alone.”

Nathan’s mother said the family knew something was wrong. Her son had been the life of the party, a bit of a hot dog. Now he wouldn’t sleep on a bed, only the floor. They were afraid to do anything that might spook him.